turncoat

On 22 Aug 2007, at 13:20, Steve Mynott wrote:
[...]
> Also it takes no more than an hour or two for a Perl programmer
> to become highly productive in Python.
Umm, bollocks. It'll take longer than that to overcome the culture
shock.
You and your editor have to get over the significant whitespace, then
you have to grip the basics of the language, then there's the
inhalation of the first few chapters of the library documentation to
get a feel for the capabilities of the basic datatypes.
I've been poking at Python on and off for a while and I'd hardly
consider myself skilled at it. I still occasionally need to go and
look back at those first few chapters to remind myself the equivalent
of, say, "unshift". (It is to the language's credit that I find I
don't actually need to do such low-level list operations terribly
often which is why they're not yet committed to memory.)
Python documentation is particularly weak, I find. In many cases it's
just a list of methods without actually bothering to tell you what
class or namespace these are for, or what class is returned! Given
that Python's type checking is effectively non-existent, this is even
more important than in a strongly-typed language where this can often
be inferred from the method signature and/or the compiler will tell
you it's wrong.